specialteas.com is gone?!?!

I recently discovered that specialteas “merged” with teavana. This is absolutely an outrage. The quality and selection of specialteas far exceeds teavana, while maintaining consistently lower prices. As of now, I don’t see any of specialteas’ products on teavana’s site.

Do you all know of any alternative places to buy fine teas? I know of adagio.com, but that’s it. Thanks for any help!

@LiberTEAs – That is correct. SpecialTeas blended their teas for them. There was once upon a time when you could buy some of Teavana’s blends wholesale from SpecialTeas, but they ended that a few years back. Any proprietary blends that Teavana had them make, were only sold to Teavana, but SpecialTeas still had a lot of teas that Teavana didn’t carry. From time to time, Teavana would start to use some of those blends, and then if they were popular, Teavana would ask them to stop wholesaling them or selling them on their web site.

I just learned that Specialteas is gone. What a tremendous loss to the tea community. Teavana is simply a retail outlet, and not a very good one at that. I am very disappointed that Specialteas would abandon us like that. Specialteas had 20 different kinds of Darjeeling, Teavana has ONE and lower quality. Very sad. Where do we go now?

Oh… and PS: I don’t consider Adagio to be quality teas. They are decent teas at decent prices. If you want good quality teas, there are MANY others to choose from that are much better quality than Adagio.

It all depends on what you’re looking for.
Might I recommend SororiTEA sisters website? They have a lot of companies there that they recommend whom they’ve had experience with. LiberTeas is one of the contributors, and so I’m sure she can send you the link….

I recommend visiting the SororiTea Sisters website, we have a tea company page that you can read a little bit about some tea companies plus you can read tea reviews on some of the teas we’ve tasted… maybe that will help you make a more informed decision!

I’m pretty bummed about Special Teas too. I’m currently in the process of finding online Tea Shops, but I have a fairly nice list going so far of all the places I’ve found that I like. You can find all of them here: http://drinkmoretea.squarespace.com

Thank you for the upton tea link you gave below! I’ve checked it out and the selection (and prices) seem comparable to Special Teas. of course, now we’ll have to order and taste to check it out more, but so far it seems promising and the loss of Special Teas not so upsetting!

We’d love to have you visit our site, www.joysteaspoon.com! We carry a variety of premium loose leaf teas as well! The best part…we will send you a couple of free samples so you can give us a try! Just shoot me an email at [email protected]!

Can anyone recommend a site that has comparable malty black teas, similar to their Ceylon Kenilworth, East Friesan, Assam House blends, Ceylon Vithanakande, etc? Most of the companies recommended here seem to specialize in flavored teas.

I have attached the link to our Orthodox black tea blends (Assam, Darjeeling, Kenilworth, etc.). I am currently offering a couple of free samples so if you wanted to try something ahead of time we would gladly get it mailed out to you. Adding Lapsang Souchoung in the next few days. You can email me at [email protected].

Same. I’m looking for robust black teas such as SpecialTeas Assam, Ceylon and African teas, in quantities of 1/4 to full pound. SpecialTeas spoiled us with variety and price. Teavana is not a replacement as best as I can tell.

Thanks everyone for all your help. I’ve placed an order with Upton and also one with the Tea Stop. I’ll probably experiment with some of the others you’ve mentioned until I find a new home (or 2 or 3 :-).

I’m an old Harney fan, but switched to Special Teas because Harney’s selection is little more limited.

I hate to sound like I’m only promoting the brands that we carry, but we really do carry quality Ceylons, Assams, Darjeelings, etc. from different brands of teas. check it out: http://www.theleafmethod.com/black.html

I know Teavana and SpecialTeas intimately. I was general manager ofa the first and only franchise Teavana store in Peachtree City, GA. The owner of the store was the original GM for Teavana who built both their first stores in Lenox and Phipps Plaza malls in Atlanta., back when they were called Elephant Tea Co. But right as I first started to work for the franchise store, Teavana got some venture capitalist looking to invest into the Teavana brand. But there were some issues with the franchise store since they didn’t have full control over us. To make a long story short, we broke away from the franchise due to the fact that we discovered Teavana had never formed a legal franchise, so they let us go clean. But Teavana told SpecialTeas, which was our biggest wholesaler, that if they wholesaled to us, they would pull their business from them. So they blacklisted us and would no longer sell to us. We had to scramble and find new wholesalers and we lost some popular blends like Rooibos Macadamia and Rooibos Tropica , which they ended up just selling to Teavana.

In the mean time, the investors invested $50 million into Teavana and they opened over 80 stores nation wide. Once they became that large, they became SpecialTeas largest client by far and eventually wanted rights to all their teas, thus the merger was inevitable.

We had blended a signature tea blend which became our most popular tea. We blended it for a friend of ours that had developed breast cancer in 2001. We called the tea ToLife Blend, because we use to sit around with her and say, “L’Chaim!” before we drank the tea with her. But people began to go into Teavana stores requesting the tea, but they did not carry it. So they sent someone down, bought the tea from us, matched the ingredients, and then went behind our backs, trademarked the name ToLife Blend, and then sent us a cease and desist letter, telling us to remove the brand and stop selling it or they’d sue us. They stole our tea out from under us. Drat! Oh, well. Just though that was an interesting story to tell.

Yup, that sounds like Teavana – I’ve heard all sorts of horror stories about how they deal with customers and how they treat their employees. They don’t have any stores here in Canada, but if they did I would boycott them in a heartbeat.

Yeah, I hate bad mouthing other tea companies. I like other tea companies, and I even promote some of them, especially if they have good customer service and some great teas that I don’t carry. But when people start doing under handed stuff like that, I think it’s only right that the consumer knows what kind of company they are dealing with. It’s not fair that companies like that succeed while good moral companies fail.